“Things I Can’t Forget” wrestles with good-girl sexuality

[media-credit name=”Sourcebooks fire” align=”alignnone” width=”317″][/media-credit] Miranda Kenneally’s “Things I Can’t Forget” is honest enough to make parents squirm, and realistic about an 18-year-old hesitant to have sex

Eighteen-year-old Kate is the quintessential good girl: Great grades, good friends, and her V-card hasn’t been punched yet. Miranda Kenneally‘s book opens as Kate remembers buying a pregnancy test — driving to another town, to avoid local gossip — for a friend who Went All The Way. When the test is positive, Kate struggles with her friend’s decisions on how to handle the pregnancy, torn between her firm Christian beliefs and her loyalty to her chum.

Underneath it all, though, Kate thinks her friend lacked discipline. How could she succumb when girls are supposed to save themselves — Kate does not ask this ironically — for marriage?

Then Kate falls for Matt, a boy she’s known since they were both campers. Now as counselors at the same camp, the two invent their own versions of stargazing and sleep-outs. Kate begins to understand that her friend’s situation is not quite as clearly defined as she first thought. Still, she is so ashamed of the role she’s played in her friend’s pregnancy that she doesn’t know if she can share it with the boy she’s beginning to know intimately. Intimately, to a point, that is. Kate’s hanging onto that V-card, even though saving herself for marriage isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when she and Matt are getting pretty hands-y:

“He runs a finger beneath the elastic of my underwear. That’s when I remember I have on plain white panties. I can’t let him see those.”

Yep, when things get real in a situation like that, losing your virginity can come down to the kind of underwear you’ve got on — right, Bridget Jones? Sunday School lessons almost are an afterthought.